What is “obvious” is a fine point and university students still struggle with knowing what is appropriate.
For a simple distance, speed, time calculation I would expect a good student to write the units so that it’s obvious by dimensional arguments. Moreover I’d argue it takes little more effort to write eg v = d/t = …
People really underestimate the importance of clear communication and scientific clarity. A student who understands the subject deep enough to clearly communicate it is likely a top student. It’s one thing to cite that formula. It’s a whole other thing to explain its derivation or to understand that for large values of ‘c’, the formula approaches the classical limit. In these jokes, there is never a well-written response because of there were, it would diminish the shock.
Of course the whole thing is a joke, but behind the scenes, the fact that the normal person lacks an understanding of what is actually important here (the ability to communicate) leads to the mess of abilities at the university level.
It’s a perpetuation of the idea that there are these little child geniuses that outsmart their teachers. Then these little geniuses graduate high school, and realise they never actually understood the subject at anything more than a superficial level.
Nah this is changing.
This of course is what they said about tablets. Now people are replacing desktop or laptop workflow with tablets, or alternatively tablets are being designed with removable keyboards so the lines are blurred.
I know scientific researchers who now only travel to conferences with tablets instead of their laptops.
Finally, I predict that we’re moving to cloud computing. It’s the natural way. You VPN into a network and your computing is done on a cluster or on a central computer.
The same is already happening for gaming. People are connecting controllers and glasses like the Xreal Air to phones, then networking into a computer to play a desktop game on their phone.